We are surrounded by Artificial Intelligence (AI), whether you are aware of it or not. From spam filters that protect you from unwanted email to autopilots in airplanes, examples of AI impacting every aspect of our everyday lives.
With such exposure to AI, many people are starting to share their concerns about the future. The biggest questions are how AI will affect our lives in general but also how will it affect our jobs.
With many jobs already being replaced by machines, the fear of losing jobs to machines might not be so crazy after all.
But what does it all mean for User Experience (UX) and for the people doing it?
Well, even though we are pretty sure designers won’t be obsolete any time soon, there will be changes in the way they work and there will be some adjustments to how UX is done in the future.
We know that AI is simply not on a level where it is able to do highly complex tasks that are linked to creative jobs like UX. According to Tim Urban from waitbutwhy.com, there are three levels of AI:
Since we are only at the first level of AI development, we can be sure that most of our jobs are safe for the time being. However, this doesn’t mean that the creative process is not influenced by AI and it sure doesn’t mean that it won’t be influenced even more in the future.
Furthermore, if we hypothesize that AI is evolving towards overtaking our jobs, we have to look at this as a long-term process during which AI is going to get gradually more and more implemented in what we do. So before we completely give our jobs to machines, there will be a whole era of people and AI working together and that is good news for designers.
In order to be successful at UX, a designer needs to go through a series of steps that can be tough and time-consuming. A cooperation between design and marketing professionals and AI is not only going to be inevitable but also practical in many ways, and it will surely make their lives much easier so keep your eyes peeled for modern digital agencies that are early adopters of commercial AI and incorporate it in their design, development and marketing processes.
While UX is mostly fun to do, there are always going to be those dull steps that every designer would like to avoid. There are countless graphic content variations that need to be done and stuff like color or image adjustment are just a part of it.
Tasks like these influence productivity and decrease efficiency by taking away the time that could be spent on important decisions that affect UX a lot more. Once computer algorithms take over this part, designers will be able to focus more on the journey itself than on the aesthetics of it.
This kind of benefit can already be seen all over the internet, the best example being recommended videos on YouTube or personalized search on Google. By collecting data on user behavior, many interfaces are already capable of offering personalized content and it won’t be much different with UX.
Based on collected data, AI can help in understanding user behavior, their habits and needs and shape content that they see accordingly. As we’ve already seen, this is happening to an extent, but in the future, the full potential of AI personalization will be unleashed into something that we can only imagine for now.
Chatbots are already widely used and they are rapidly replacing traditional customer support. With algorithms that allow them to learn quickly and acquire vast amounts of information from users, chatbots will prove to be a priceless tool in UX.
While intelligent bots with which you can chat in real time are still at the early stages of development, they are already proving their potency and importance for UX. In the future, chatbots might not even be restricted to the online realm, but they might become a part of everyday life, coexisting or even merging with something like Siri or Alexa to create the ultimate UX.
Learn more about how you can use chatbots for marketing strategies.
With many products out there intended for wide use, there is always going to be those users who prefer one feature over the other. In order to discover which feature is the most popular, developers often use split testing, a practice in which two versions of a product are offered to users in order to see which one works better. AI has already found its way into A/B/n and multivariate testing.
This is where personalization comes into focus once more. With personalized content for every user, split testing is going to disappear completely and with that, a lot of time and resources will be saved. Until then it is important to be able to prioritise your user feedback.
There is much debate about the evolution of AI, but we can never be certain what is going to happen with AI until it actually happens. The fact is that AI is already a part of our lives and it is only going to become more and more implemented in every field, especially in the IT industry.
That being said, the probability of humans being completely replaced is far-fetched for now. The best we can do is adjust and find ways of exploiting AI and making the process of designing easier and smoother, thus increasing productivity and coming up with better results and supreme UX.
